The Media Interview

The way NPR’s Bryant Park Project tells it, the Icelandic band Sigur Ros was at fault for what it calls “possibly the worst interview in the history of electronic media”. Seriously. It was that bad. We’re not sure if they were tired, or if it was a language thing, or what… but wow. Whereas most [...]

Rosie O’Donnell has shunned (so far) all mainstream media interviews about her new book Celebrity Detox. Instead, she’s posted a series of self-produced interview clips on her blog. Citizen entertainment journalism at work.

Having just written about the growth of TV cameras in radio studios and the need to watch what you say during commercials breaks, comes this story from KESQ TV: The male escort responsible for the downfall of Christian evangelist leader Ted Haggard is now alleging that embattled Senator Larry Craig also came to see him. [...]

Author Will Weaver on being prepared for unprepared interviewers: My 2 1/2 minute TV interview was with a woman anchor with big hair and pancake make-up, who scanned my novel’s inside cover during a cut-away to a commercial, then returned, on-air, to brightly to ask me questions about the novel –but I know the game, [...]

Would you like weekly samples of real-life PR that did and did not work? Then subscribing to Touchdowns & Fumbles will help fill that need. Produced by Veritas Communications, this weekly email newsletter has plenty of media coaching hits and misses, so readers of this blog will be well pleased too. Go forth and subscribe!

In the rush to fill a 24 hour cable news channel, ABC News demonstrates the dangers of throwing interviewers still in their first month of broadcasting school straight onto the air… Ok, the “first month of broadcasting school” may be a bit unfair to Merry Miller of ABC News Now, but I can certainly say [...]

I heard a headline on CNN the other day that made me curious. New York Rep. Peter King allegedly said there were too many mosques in the United States, but he claimed he was being taken out of context. The remarks were said to be in an interview with Politico.com, so I immediately brought it [...]

Here’s a cautionary tale about being misrepresented through the editing of an interview. It concerns a Columbia University professor of the philosophy of physics, David Albert, who agreed to be interviewed for the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? This pseudo-documentary, released in 2004, claims that quantum mechanics proves, among other things, that reality [...]

Check out this detailed account on the Huffington Post of how the message of a media interview can get misrepresented in the editing process and perhaps more importantly how the misrepresentation certainly seems deliberate. According to business psychologist and author Debra Condren, she was approached by a producer from ABC’s Nightline, who was looking for [...]

A far worse sin than not having read a guest’s book, is to try and dip into it quickly and pretend you’ve read it, as this anecdote from Gail Williams illustrates, during an email forum featuring radio host Angie Coiro on The Well, July 2006: I [once] asked a question of an author… based on [...]